Week 4 of a 52 weeks project I’m having a crack at where every photo has to be taken at f22, meaning the pictures will be unrelentingly sharp across the focal range.
This one was shot from the other side of the house to the first image in the project, and yes, I feel bad for being lazy and not getting out into the world and shooting properly for this project! The problem is that it’s fucking cold at the moment and I don’t feel like it. Ha!
Annoyingly though there was a great shot to be had at the train station today. They’re doing engineering works (are they ever not?) and there was an army of engineers crawling about the train tracks wearing ludicrously bright high-vis orange suits. The colours popped out from the drab grey and green background they were milling about on beautifully. Alas I didn’t have my camera with me.
We were on our way to see the Chris Ofili retrospective at Tate Britain, which I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would. On the train on the way back, the high rise buildings and gas towers that litter the route out of London Bridge station mocked me for leaving my camera at work, as they strutted against a perfectly clouded, late afternoon sky. Next weekend I’ll have to go out especially to try and photo some of them. I’ve got about 4 gas towers in mind now, and I reckon the high rise flats of South London will look great at f22, so long as I can find the right vantage points.
Another disappointing week as far as this project goes but I’m not sweating it. My Gran died and it was her funeral last Friday, so I’m not going to be too hard on myself for not putting a lot of effort in!
This pic was taken after we got home from the crematorium. As you can see it was a befittingly downbeat day weather wise.
I’m enjoying doing this project, but I’m struggling a little to come up with ideas that best take advantage of using f22. The most obvious use of the aperture is to take landscape shots, so that’s what I’ve been tending towards so far. That’s fine, to an extent. I’ve not been taking as many landscape images in the last couple of years, preferring instead to focus on portraiture, and it’ll be fine if I finish the year with a more developed landscape portfolio, but I’m hoping I can come up with some more diverse ideas and uses for using f22.
Entry 2 of a ’52 weeks’ project I’m having a crack at wherein every image of the project will be taken at f22 and will therefore be unforgivingly sharp throughout the focal range.
I love these structures and think I will probably take quite a lot of photographs of them for this project, but it’s a bit of a miserable one this … it was grey, dull and rainy, and there’s so much clutter. I’m not sure I like it a great deal but I suppose it’s not feasible to expect that I’ll be happy with every image I take for this project. I guess it’s half the point that you don’t, and therefore learn something.
Here’s an image I took of some gas towers in Hackney when I lived there a few years back …
This was my first time out with the Canon 5D MkII – I think I’d only had it for a day or so when I took it out on this shoot, and I made a number of rookie mistakes! First and foremost, I hadn’t figured out how to get the camera out of ‘auto’ for shooting video, and subsequently the exposures aren’t what I would have liked them to be. For some reason the colours came out very yellow as well, so I had to struggle to correct it properly in post, but didn’t have a lot of luck – I don’t really like the final grade; his eyes look very pink around the edges, and his face is a funny kind of peachy colour.
I also ran out of space on my compact flash cards half way through the interview, having completely underestimated how much space one needs when shooting video. Luckily I bought along a Sony Z1 which was running alongside the 5D!
If anyone has any suggestions (with links perhaps) for how to make one on one interviews more interesting to look at as pieces of entertainment I’d be really keen to hear them.
In a rush of New Year’s motivation I decided to give a ’52 weeks’ project a go this year. What this means is that you pick a certain theme and then use it to make an image every week. They’re very popular among budding photographers and the benefits they give to developing a certain skill or sensibility are obvious.
Last year I bought a wonderful lens – a Sigma f1.4 50mm. It can take pictures with extreme ‘bokeh’ – a very shallow depth of field – where only a very small part of the image is in focus, and the rest is blurred. Here’s a couple of examples:
The effect is very pretty, very impactful. It helps focus the attention of the eye, and removes distracting background clutter by blurring it out.
The problem is that it’s too easy! It’s almost like cheating; like adding free pathos to every image you take.
So, in order to try and avoid getting stuck in a rut, and to help keep my brain working, I thought I would make f22 the theme of my 52 weeks project. For the uninitiated, this means that the whole image will be in crisp focus, no shallow depth of field helping to make my pictures look better than they really are.
Above is my first effort, somewhat lazily taken out of the roof window of my study, overlooking the houses of Forest Hill.
A corporate “Christmas Card” video that I shot using the Canon 7D last month.
I realise that everyone’s probably had enough of Christmas by now, but in the end this video, for reasons not fully understandable, was left on the (digital) cutting room floor, as the company I made it for didn’t want to use it, and I thought it a shame to have spent so much time making it for nobody to see it!
Everything apart from the overhead tree decorating sequence, which was shot as a stills time lapse on a Canon 5D, was shot at 720@60fps on a Canon 7D and slowed down to 25fps in Cinema Tools to get nice slow motion.
The 7D is great, and makes lovely images, but it’s not a patch on the 5D when it comes to low light performance.
Check me out! The year is, what, 5 days old? And already I’ve got my first New Year’s resolution project out the way. I am OWNING the ten … ties. The ten’s? The one’s? Well, whatever, I am flush with New Year’s motivation, and have made a wallpaper set from some macro shots of old circuit boards that we have built into a fancy coffee table at home.
I’ve chopped them up into widescreen (1920×1200), traditional 4:3 (1280×960), iPhone (320×480) and G1 Android (640×480) sizes – links for each are underneath the images below … you know what to do.
There’s also some handily assembled zip files containing all the images, if you’re so inclined …
